26 October 2023: NCPR Interview with Melissa DeRosa

Former Cuomo aide talks NY COVID response, thoughts on Hochul in new memoir

North Country Public Radio's Karen DeWitt interviewed Melissa DeRosa, the former Secretary to the Governor of the State of New York, who served under the resigned-in-disgrace Andrew M. Cuomo while he governed the state. In that role, she was among the most powerful officials within New York's state government and was the first official within that administration to acknowledge its attempted cover-up of the excess nursing home deaths that resulted from Cuomo's deadly 25 March 2020 directive.

In this interview, which came in connection with the promotion of her recent book, she goes a bit farther in acknowledging the devastating impact of that policy. Here's what NCPR calls a "lightly edited" portion of the transcript:

KAREN DeWITT: You present a defense of the March 25, 2020 nursing home policy. It became kind of an infamous decision to allow hospitalized COVID-positive nursing home residents to go back into the nursing homes. And you also talked about the report by Attorney General Tish James that said you undercounted the deaths by 50%. You present a defense of that, but I wonder, in retrospect, do you think that if you and the governor had maybe just apologized for that decision, instead of kind of doubling down on it, maybe it would have played out differently politically?

MELISSA DeROSA: I don't mean to try to present a defense of it in the book. My intention was to try to explain it to people: what it was, what happened, what was going on around us. I think that, particularly as it related to nursing homes, and the weaponization and the politicization of what happened around nursing homes, combined with the very real pain of the families who lost loved ones, it just became this political football that it never should have been. And looking back, if I knew then what I knew today, I would do a lot of things differently. But my heart goes out to people who lost loved ones in nursing homes. As I write in the book, you know, every decision that was being made was done with the best possible intent with the information that we had at the time.

As as a reminder, the decision was to force patients known to have been infected with the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus to be accepted into nursing homes, where the portion of the state's population known to be the most vulnerable to dying from a COVID-19 lived, including many that had no confirmed or suspected cases at the time the decision was made, in order to free up bed space at New York's hospitals.

Not only was that policy was immediately flagged for its disastrous potential when it was announced and implemented, Governor Cuomo's own statements in the days preceding it confirm that both he and his adminstration knew it was virtually guaranteed to have disastrous consequences.

This entry was added to the timeline on 28 October 2023.